Pem’s Tech Blog

Overall, I’ve mostly failed so far to turn this blog into summaries of my recent / current hobby projects (and what concepts and technologies etc I learned).  It’s a time sink just to do any hobby projects (in addition to the already limitless supply of code work and relevant study for me to do for my paid job).

I tend to keep a lot of notes as I’m working on something (both paper and electronic).  But converting those into concise and meaningful blog posts usually costs resources (time and effort / focus) that could be spent elsewhere.

That said, I’ve elected to at least share a brief one about very basic gcc / g++ use.

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/08/05 (Thursday, August 5, 2010) :: Blogging :: No Comments »

In my previous post, I mentioned how the WordPress “Customizable Permalinks” plugin prevents me from using WordPress for iPad (iPod touch, etc), by breaking the XML RPC.

wp-admin –> Settings –> Permalinks linked to more info here ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks ).  Default uses “?p=N” (post number), while pretty permalinks let you specify other formats, such as “yyyy/mm/dd/post-name”.

For yahoo web hosting, this didn’t work, and I think it has something to do with the .htaccess file, or yahoo’s particular web server.  The Yahoo “Customizable Permalinks” plugin makes the permalinks work, but it causes the XML RPC to break.

In any event, I ended up going to “wp-admin/options-permalink.php”, and changing it to Custom Structure “/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/”.

This allowed me to have the prettier custom url structure permalinks, yet still have XML RPC work.  There may be a way to take out the “index.php”, even with Yahoo web hosting, but I didn’t look very hard yet…  So maybe someone else knows the answer?

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/05/21 (Friday, May 21, 2010) :: Blogging :: No Comments »

I’m writing this using WordPress for iPad.

Overall, it’s very good news just that it works. Although, it didn’t work instantly, since when I tried to connect to my wordpress blog, it gave me an error relating to the xml rpc xml protocol. This had happened when I first tried WordPress for iPhone, so I knew to try disabling plugins, which fixed the problem. The offending plugin was "Customizable Permalinks".

Unfortunately, the app is pretty bare bones, such as compared to Windows Live Writer (a Windows desktop app).

Sadly, it’s frozen and crashed, and even had the save button disappear while editing a post… All within 5 minutes of using it. Since you can save drafts, it’s not the end of the world, but kind of annoying.

For editing an existing post, it’s only edit mode shows the HTML – no WYSIWYG.

Overall, it’s awesome that there is a WordPress app for iPad, and it at least has the basic functionality working. The functionality is not particularly amazing, but it has some reasonable basic functionality and a nice iPad UI.

If you type "http:", a popup box asks if you want to make a link.

To publish, you tap "Status" and change from "Local Draft" to "Published". You can also choose "Draft", which is awesome, since that syncs to my WordPress blog, which allows me to continue to edit the post from somewhere else (before I publish), such as Windows Live Writer (on Windows 7 desktop OS).

It lets you attach photos, which is great.  Although what I did for this post was attach the photos, then copy/paste them using the Windows Live Writer plugin “Clipboard Image” (Clipboard Capture).  This is so I can more easily use (or tweak) a standard size for (the thumb image and the larger image).

The ability to moderate posts (ie, mark as “Approve” or as “Spam”) is also very useful / convenient.

Finally, the bad news is that disabling the WordPress Customizable Permalinks plugin caused my page’s post links to no longer work… So until I fix that issue, it’s not very convenient to blog from the WordPress iPad app.

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/05/20 (Thursday, May 20, 2010) :: Blogging, Mobility :: 2 Comments »

I’ve reorganized my categories, with an emphasize and 4 main categories (with sub-categories): Software Development (programming), Computers / Tech (that’s not software development), Games (as opposed to game programming), Other (anything else not related to the other 3 categories).

Depending on what direction this blog takes, I may later revisit the categories.  For example, if it ends up being 90% software development (or 90% games), then I would be likely to end up merging the other categories.

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/04/11 (Sunday, April 11, 2010) :: Blogging :: No Comments »

I’ve installed the Merge Tags Plugin.  Inside wp-admin, I just went to Plugins –> Add New, and searched for “merge”.  The plugin says to go to

/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category

I used this to merge my old categories “Travel” and "Mobile Devices / Services” into my new category “Mobility”.

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/04/11 (Sunday, April 11, 2010) :: Blogging :: No Comments »

Here’s all I did (from 2.9.0 to 2.9.2):

1) click “Upgrade Automatically” button (from inside the web page wp-admin controls).  This overwrote my WordPress theme.

1a) Last time I did disable plugins, then upgrade automatically, then re-enable recently active plugins.  I didn’t do that this time (luckily, nothing broke)

1b) At this point, all the links were working correctly

2) The new default theme gets changed with the upgrade, so I renamed the ftp folder /wp-content/themes/default/ to default_2.9.2, then uploaded (from my hard drive) my existing folder \wp-content\themes\default\ … to get back my old wordpress theme (web page style)

2a) At the moment, I’ve been using FileZilla for the FTP (on Windows)

2b) Everything worked as expected

I also clicked “upgrade automatically” for a plugin (WPtouch iPhone Theme)

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/04/10 (Saturday, April 10, 2010) :: Blogging :: No Comments »

I’m adding a new category…  Probably what I should do is create a separate blog (or page / area) that is for software development (programming, computer science, graphics programming, game development, virtualization programming, code tools, application development, etc) related stuff.  In fact, probably what I should really do is just delete this blog and focus on development topics O:-).  But for the moment, I’ll just make this a new category: Software Development

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/01/10 (Sunday, January 10, 2010) :: Blogging, Misc :: No Comments »

Here’s all I did:

1) Disable all plugins, use the automatic upgrade link inside wp-admin/upgrade.php, re-enable recently active plugins

2) I noticed that my Categories and Archives URL links were broken (actually, since before this upgrade), but this was fixed when I reactivated the plugin “Customizable Permalinks”

3) The new default theme gets changed with the upgrade, so I renamed the ftp folder /wp-content/themes/default/ to default_2.9.0, then uploaded (from my hard drive) my existing folder \wp-content\themes\default\ … to get back my old wordpress theme (web page style)

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/01/01 (Friday, January 1, 2010) :: Blogging :: No Comments »

Installed WPtouch iPhone theme: A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones.

Pem (Admin) :: 2010/01/01 (Friday, January 1, 2010) :: Blogging :: No Comments »

Behind corporate firewall proxy, iPod WordPress app

Pem (Admin) :: 2009/12/09 (Wednesday, December 9, 2009) :: Blogging :: No Comments »